ieving in Tira's endurance was that Tira was not alone. She had, like
Old Crow, her sustaining symbol. She had, whatever the terrifying
circumstance of her daily life, divine companionship. She had her Lord,
Jesus Christ.

"I believe," said Raven abruptly, one day when they were tramping the
snowy road and she was answering the panic of his apprehensive mind,
"you swear by Old Crow's book."

"I do," said Nan simply, "seem to be hanging on to Old Crow. I've read
it over and over. And it does somehow get me. Picture writing! And human
beings drawing the lines and half the time not getting them straight!
But if there's something to draw, I don't care how bad the drawing is.
If there's actually something there! There is, Rookie. Tira's got hold
of it because she's pure in heart. It's something real, and it'll see
her through."

Raven was not content with its seeing her through until he could be told
what the appointed end was likely to be. If Tira was to fight this
desperate battle all her mortal life, he wasn't to be placated by the
rewarding certainty of a heavenly refuge at the end.

"I can never," he said, "get over the monstrous queerness of it all.
Here's a woman that's got to be saved, and she's so infernally obstinate
we can't save her. When I think of it at night, I swear I'm a fool not
to complain of the fellow in spite of her, and then in the morning I
know it can't be done. She'd block me, and I should only have got her in
for something worse than she's in for now."

"Yes," said Nan, "she'd block you. Wait, Rookie. Something will happen.
Something always does."

Yes, Raven thought, something always does, and sometimes, in country
tragedies, so brutal a thing that the remorseful mind shudders at itself
for not preventing it. But Nan, equably as she might counsel him, was
herself apprehensive. She expected something. She had a sense of waiting
for it. Dick must be prepared. He must be found on their side. Whatever
the outcome, Raven must not suffer the distrust and censure of his own
house.

Dick had been reading to her by the fire while Raven was taking Amelia
for a sober walk. Nan wished Dick wouldn't read his verse to her. It
made her sorry for him. What was he doing, a fellow who had seen such
things, met life and death at their crimson flood, pottering about in
these bizarre commonplaces of a literary jog-trot? They sounded right
enough, if you stood for that kind of thing, but they betrayed him, his